When running Ceph in a homelab environment, especially on resource-constrained hardware like my Dell Wyse 3040 cluster, managing storage capacity becomes critical. Understanding Ceph’s Nearfull warnings and how to respond to them can prevent your cluster from going read-only unexpectedly.

I’ve been running Proxmox in my homelab since version 7.4, and the journey to Proxmox 8.2.2 was to say the least… educational. Let me share some hard-won lessons that might save you some headaches. These even apply to the Proxmox 9 upgrades as well which I have not scheduled in my cluster yet. I’m pretty sure I’ll have updates when I get to that upgrade to share.

The Ceph Dashboard is incredibly useful for monitoring your cluster’s health, but setting it up on Proxmox isn’t as straightforward as the documentation suggests. After wrestling with SSL certificates and password policies, here’s how to get it working properly.

Why You Want the Ceph Dashboard

The dashboard gives you a web interface to monitor your Ceph cluster without SSH’ing into nodes and running CLI commands. You can see OSD status, pool usage, performance metrics, and cluster health at a glance. It’s essential for any serious homelab running Ceph. Or if you are doing something unusual like use USB Drives for your storage media and want additional metrics for performance evaluation. I also have fast SSDs for my DB/WAL with the USB Drives for Data.